>>PREVIEW
COOPED
Spymonkey and One Yellow Rabbit
Created by Spymonkey and Cal McCrystal
Starring Spymonkey
Directed by Cal McCrystal
Runs until November 12
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
So, there are three Brits, an Austrian, a Spaniard and a Canadian, and they’re all sitting around a table, talking about farting.
"I’ve had to train for two years to fart on cue," chirps one of the Brits, Petra Massey, referring to her method-like preparations for her role as the super-flatulent heroine of Spymonkey’s Cooped.
"Two years!" exclaims the Canadian – namely, me. "What kind of training did you do?"
"Sphincter exercises and yoga," replies Massey, a pert woman with short hair who looks a little like a young Judi Dench. Wow, I’m thinking to myself, Judi Dench is confiding to me her farting secrets. Well, kinda.
But Aitor Basauri is having none of this Stanislavskian rubbish. Basauri’s the Spaniard – a lugubrious-looking fellow with a dearth of cranial hair, compensated for by a pair of jet-black sideburns so wide that Elvis himself might be envious. Leaning across the table, he asserts that he has his own quick ’n’ dirty means of attaining a raucous gastrointestinal performance.
"For me, what works the best is eating chips," he reveals. "McDonald’s chips. Give me those and I can guarantee you I can fart incredibly well in 20 minutes."
But, lest I imagine that Cooped is an evening of vulgar – not to say toxic – theatre, director Cal McCrystal (Brit No. 2, and the guy in the ball cap helpfully labelled "Cal"), hastens to assure me otherwise. "This is high-class, sophisticated farting," he says. And – pace Petra – it’s all done with sound effects.
Welcome to the secret world of Spymonkey, a troupe of European comedians who take their fart jokes – and other physical comedy – seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they’ve devoted the past seven years to insidiously spreading their special brand of slapstick across 17 countries and countless stages, from the hole-in-the-wall venues of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to the monster hotels of Las Vegas. In the process, they’ve been compared to everyone from the Marx Brothers to the Muppets, while provoking complementary physical comedy from the critics. "(M)ade me laugh so much my throat hurt," reported one from The Times of London. "Almost made me lose control of my bladder," admitted another in Metro.
Now, fresh from a two-year run as the "porno clowns" in Cirque du Soleil’s adults-only Las Vegas cabaret, Zumanity, Spymonkey has swung into One Yellow Rabbit to hatch its latest nefarious plot. The quartet of zanies, plus collaborator McCrystal, are mounting a new, improved version of Cooped, their last hit show, which makes its debut in Calgary and then sets off to conquer the world.
Or London and New York, at the very least.
"We’ve got this New York management company that’s interested in us," says Massey, "so they’re hopefully going to be bringing lots of people from New York to come and see the show. The intention is to get an off-Broadway run and a West End run."
So why launch an international tour with big ambitions at One Yellow Rabbit?
"We like each other very much," says Basauri.
NOT-SO-DARK SHADOWS
The Monkey met the Rabbit back in 2000, at the Edinburgh Fringe, and discovered they shared a similar physical theatre sensibility – in fact, it turned out Stephan Kreiss, Spymonkey’s Austrian member, had once taken a workshop with OYR’s Denise Clarke. Spymonkey was invited to bring its first show, the undertaker spoof Stiff, to the Rabbit’s 2002 High Performance Rodeo, while OYR in turn spent a week in the U.K. working with the troupe.
Shortly after that, Spymonkey made the lucrative decision to hitch its star to Cirque du Soleil as Zumanity’s resident clowns. But percolating in the back of their sly simian minds was a plan to eventually expand the hour-long Cooped – a sort-of sequel to Stiff that was first unveiled at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe – so that it could tour bigger theatres as a full evening’s entertainment.
Cooped is an anything-goes spoof of gothic romances, in which a blond-wigged, go-go-booted Massey plays the innocent (and windy) young orphan girl Laura du Lay, who takes a post as private secretary to the suave, mysterious widower Forbes Murdston (Toby Park) at his gloomy manor in the wilds of Northumberlandshirehampton. Laura falls hard for her handsome employer, but is he entirely what he appears to be? Does Klaus (Kreiss), his sinister German butler, know the master’s dark secret? And will that Spanish Scotland Yard inspector (Basauri) get to the bottom of it all?
If Stiff drew comparisons to Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, then the plot of Cooped reads like a send-up of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and, by extension, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. But McCrystal claims its pedigree isn’t as high-class as all that. Actually, the source of inspiration was Dark Shadows, a cheesy gothic soap that aired on ABC Television in the 1960s and predated Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in probing the romantic lives of the undead.
"I used to watch that show when I was a kid," says McCrystal, who grew up in New Jersey.
Of course, this being Spymonkey, there are a few components not normally seen in cheesy gothic soaps. "There are pop songs in the middle of it, martial arts and nudity – full-frontal," says McCrystal.
For the revised Cooped, the company has added special effects, more scenes and songs, and even a Vegas-style dance number choreographed by a fellow Cirque artiste. They’ve also given it a little more dramatic (or at least melodramatic) ballast.
"We’re able to add a lot more pathos than was in the show before," says McCrystal. "It’s a very important trick in a funny show to give the audience an opportunity to get emotionally involved, so that then they laugh a little bit harder at you afterwards."
"We’re emotional now," sums up Basauri, "but we’re still stupid."
OF VEGAS AND FAKE GENITALIA
Spymonkey began concocting their sidesplitting style of stupidity in 1997, when Basauri, Massey and the tall, plummy-voiced Park (Brit No. 3, and also the group’s composer) met while working with a Swiss theatre troupe in Zurich. Teaming with McCrystal, an Irish-born writer and director with a reputation for cranking out Edinburgh Fringe comedy hits, they devised Stiff. Kreiss joined their ranks in 2000, turning the company into a kind of mini European Union (albeit a bit more harmonious). While Kreiss lives in Vienna and Basauri in Bilbao, on the northwest coast of Spain ("It’s completely beautiful," he rhapsodizes. "What? Bilbao?" says McCrystal. "You’ve got to get out more, really"), the troupe makes its headquarters in Brighton, England when not on tour.
Spymonkey’s last and longest gig, the two-year stint in Las Vegas, came about thanks to the ongoing association with McCrystal. Having directed the comedy sequences for Cirque’s touring Varekai production, he was hired to do the funny bits for Zumanity, one of the Quebec company’s four Vegas-based shows and its first foray into risqué, R-rated entertainment, and asked Spymonkey to be the clowns.
You’d think creating a sex show in Sin City would be a piece of cake, but McCrystal says it turned out to be "a hell of a struggle." While he’d been given total artistic freedom on Varekai, in Vegas he had to contend with Cirque’s business partners, MGM and Mirage. "There were lots of suits wandering around, saying, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t do this.’ Because it was meant to be an erotic show, we’d been told that they wanted us to be edgy, and that’s what we went for. But we had to fight really hard to keep the style of what we do from being (homogenized)."
For example?
"Because of all the prostitution (in Vegas), there are all these laws about nudity and obscenity," says McCrystal. "We pushed for nudity in (Zumanity), and the number we were doing was so funny they didn’t want to lose it, so to compromise they made these super-realistic merkins, with pubic hair and penises, stuck invisibly over top of (the performers’) own genitals."
That kind of creative restriction is why Spymonkey decided to turn down a contract renewal with Cirque this summer and head for Calgary and the Rabbit warren to rework Cooped.
With London’s commercial theatre getting more adventurous (take Jerry Springer – The Opera, for example), the troupe feels it stands a good chance of one day basking in the bright lights of the West End. And, eventually, the itinerant bunch would also like to put down roots, à la their Canadian hosts.
"If we could get a setup like One Yellow Rabbit has, that would be brilliant," says Massey.
It seems the Rabbit remains the envy of other creation-based theatre companies in its well-nigh unique position of also running its own theatre, presenting other artists and staging an annual festival.
"It’s amazing what they do," says Park in admiration. "I can’t think of anything anywhere where there’s that mix. This is a really good model for us." |
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